{"id":16209,"date":"2012-08-07T12:32:38","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T17:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=16209"},"modified":"2012-08-07T13:02:45","modified_gmt":"2012-08-07T18:02:45","slug":"what-texas-fracking-disclosure-law-does-and-doesnt-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/08\/07\/what-texas-fracking-disclosure-law-does-and-doesnt-do\/","title":{"rendered":"What Texas’ Fracking Disclosure Law Does and Doesn’t Do"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Mike Ehrmann\/Getty Images<\/p>

As Dallas debates how to regulate fracking within city limits, a new report sheds light on what exactly could be used to drill deep underground.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” involves sending an awful lot of stuff into the ground. A new report<\/a> by the Dallas Morning News<\/em> examines just how much stuff is needed, and what exactly is in it.<\/p>\n

Dallas’ City Council is currently considering regulation of fracking<\/a> within city limits, so the Morning News<\/em> decided to learn what they could about what kind of “stuff” would be sent underground. The paper’s\u00a0environmental\u00a0writer, Randy Lee Loftis, looks at one well in Dallas County<\/a>, owned and operated by Chesapeake Energy, one of the country’s biggest drillers<\/a>. The company had voluntarily disclosed much of what it used to frack the well last August, ahead of a new law<\/a> passed by the Texas legislature mandating such disclosures.<\/p>\n

So what did they find? It took 38 million pounds of stuff to frack the well and release the gas trapped deep below.<\/p>\n

Most of that (32 million pounds, or nearly four million gallons) was water. A lot of it, close to four million pounds of the mix, was sand. Water and sand made up roughly 95 percent of the materials used to frack the well.<\/p>\n

Then there are the chemicals, as much as 55,000 pounds of them:<\/p>\n

“…the rest of what went underground was chemicals \u2014 acids, alcohols, petroleum-related mixtures and others.\u00a0Doing the math indicates that well 3H might have received as much as 55,000 pounds of chemicals. If the other wells in the Barnett Shale have required similar amounts, the chemical injection across the region may have approached 1 billion pounds.<\/p>\n

The Chesapeake report did not specify the exact amount of each chemical or product that was used, only the maximum possible percentage. So the total chemical amount for the well could be an overestimate, but the numbers do show that the chemical use might be higher than the public imagined.\u00a0Hydrogen chloride, for example, might make up just 0.09 percent of the fracking fluid, but that might represent 35,480 pounds.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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